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M69

The M69 is the motorway between Leicester and Coventry, providing an exceptionally good way between two provincial cities. It's the sort of connection that many other prosperous cities would fight for. There are an extravagant six lanes for most of the journey, which means that it usually feels very quiet and very fast.

Bigger things were planned for this road, since at the Leicester end it seems to finish at an incomplete junction. Before the northern terminus, the carriageways split apart, leaving room for the motorway to continue onwards, and the road narrows from three lanes to two before navigating a series of curves on what was supposed to be a sliproad to reach the M1 roundabout. North of here, the motorway was planned to cross the M1, with free-flowing sliproads to the north, before connecting directly with the A563 Leicester Outer Ring Road close to its junction with the A47. Local opposition to this plan halted it, though Highways England do still entertain ideas of using the unfinished end to provide free-flowing sliproads onto the M1.

At the southern end, there are free-flowing sliproads onto the M6 towards Birmingham, and if you look closely, stubs for more sliproads to be added. Free-flowing access was meant to be provided onto a southern extension of the road, but that was never built, and when it did finally appear in the 1980s it was as part of the A46.

There was, at one time, a vague intention that the motorway might go all the way to the M5, connecting end-on to the M50 at Strensham. Plans to connect the M42 at J3a to the M50 advanced much further, but neither came to pass, so the M50 was never connected to anything and the M69 strays no further than Coventry.